Professor Oddball and the Great Custard Lecture
A Bit of tongue-in-cheek dry humor for your enjoyment. Enjoy.
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Professor Horace Oddball woke on the most important morning of his career to find his cat sitting on his face.
This was not unusual. Newton, a large orange cat of strong opinions, considered the professor’s face to be his alarm clock, his pillow, and on cold nights, his central heating. The professor lifted him off, sat up, and blinked around the bedroom with his enormous, perpetually startled eyes.
People often assumed Professor Oddball was frightened of something. He was not. His eyes had simply been that size since birth, and the dark rings beneath them had been there since roughly 1971, when he discovered fluid dynamics and stopped sleeping properly. He was not alarmed. He was interested. In everything. All the time. It came to the same expression.
“Good morning, Newton,” he said. “Today is the day.”
Newton, who had heard this every morning for eleven years, went to sit in the sink.
It was, in fact, the day. At ten o’clock that morning, in the great lecture theater of Hartwell Hall, Professor Oddball was to present his life’s work, On the Turbulent Behavior of Viscous Fluids Under Rotational Stress, to a delegation of the most distinguished physicists in Europe. They had flown in from Geneva especially. The Dean, a brisk, nervous woman named Dr. Pemberton, had reminded him of this six times that week, twice in writing, once by telephone, and three times by leaving notes pinned to his office door, his overcoat, and on one occasion, the back of his head.
He had found that last one rather surprising, when he discovered it at dinner.
He dressed with great care. His best black suit. His best white shirt. His thin black tie, which he knotted with tremendous concentration and only slightly to one side. He attempted to comb his hair. His hair, which had been wild since he was nineteen and had grown wilder every year since, rose up off his scalp in great gray loops and wisps and spirals, like a pencil drawing of a thunderstorm, and declined to be combed. He gave up, as he always did, and found two pencils, a teaspoon, and a library card from 1994 in it while he was trying.
For breakfast he made toast and tea. He put the morning post in the toaster and the bread in the letter rack, noticed nothing, ate the letter rack bread with butter, and left the house at a quarter past nine with a piece of lightly charred electricity bill sticking out of his breast pocket like a handkerchief.
He wore one black shoe and one brown shoe. They were very good shoes.
The university was a twenty-minute walk. Professor Oddball had made it in twenty minutes perhaps twice in thirty years. The trouble was the world. The world was simply too interesting to walk through quickly.
Three streets from his house, he stopped dead in the middle of the pavement to watch a pigeon.
It was walking in a most peculiar way, bobbing its head forward with each step, and the professor had never before considered why pigeons did that. Was it a matter of visual stabilization? Of balance? He bent down to observe it more closely, his hands on his knees, his nose about four inches from the bird.
At that precise moment, a young man in a hooded sweatshirt came sprinting around the corner with a lady’s red handbag clutched under his arm, running flat out, looking back over his shoulder at the woman shouting behind him.
He did not see the professor bent double in the middle of the pavement until it was much too late.
There was a thump, a yelp, a spectacular somersault, and the young man landed flat on his back in a hedge. The red handbag sailed through the air in a long, graceful arc and landed neatly in the professor’s hands.
Professor Oddball straightened up and looked at it in mild surprise. Then he looked at the young man in the hedge.
“Goodness,” he said. “I am terribly sorry. Are you all right? Here, let me help you.” He hauled the dazed young man out of the hedge, brushed some leaves off his shoulders, and looked at him with his enormous, kindly, unblinking eyes. “You should really look where you’re going, you know. You might have stepped on the pigeon.”
The young man stared at him. Something about those eyes, huge and pale and staring and utterly unreadable, seemed to upset him very much. He made a strangled noise and ran away, without the handbag.
The professor turned to find a breathless elderly lady arriving behind him. He held the handbag out to her politely.
“I believe you dropped this, madam,” he said. “A young man was just running to return it to you. He seemed in a terrible hurry.”
The lady took the handbag and stared at him with her mouth open. The professor tipped an imaginary hat to her, because he had forgotten his real one, and went on his way, pondering pigeons.
Two streets later, he stopped on a bridge to study the ripples in the river, and was so absorbed in the turbulent eddies around the bridge supports that he failed to notice the runaway baby carriage rolling down the hill toward the water behind him, until it bumped into the back of his knees and stopped. He looked down at the baby. The baby looked up at him. Both of them had very large eyes. They regarded each other with deep mutual interest until a frantic young father arrived to retrieve it, sobbing with relief and thanking him over and over.
“Not at all,” said the professor, who had no idea what for. “Charming child. Excellent head control. Have you considered the pigeon question?”
It was eight minutes to ten when he finally reached the university. He hurried across the quadrangle toward a large stone building with a grand doorway, over which were carved the words HARTWELL HALL.
He did not notice the smaller words carved underneath, which said SCHOOL OF CULINARY ARTS.
He did not notice that the physics building, which was also called Hartwell Hall, after the same dead benefactor, was the one directly across the courtyard.
He had been giving lectures at this university for thirty-one years. He had walked into the wrong Hartwell Hall eleven times.
He pushed through the doors of the large room at the end of the corridor and found thirty young people in white jackets and tall white hats, standing behind long steel counters covered in pots, pans, whisks, and bowls.
They all turned to look at him. A ripple of excitement went through the room.
They had been waiting forty minutes for a guest instructor: the famously eccentric Chef Bertrand of Lyon, a culinary genius who was said to have wild hair, strange eyes, and a habit of wandering off in the middle of sentences. None of them had ever seen him. And here, at last, in the doorway, stood a tall, thin, wild-haired old man in a black suit, with enormous staring eyes and a piece of burnt paper in his breast pocket.
“Chef!” cried a young woman in the front row. “You made it!”
Professor Oddball looked around at the steel counters, the bowls of thick golden custard, the pans of bubbling sauce, the whisks and ladles and spatulas.
“Good heavens,” he said, with deep approval. “What marvelous demonstration apparatus. Dr. Pemberton has outdone herself.”
He took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, picked up a whisk, and began his lecture.
It was, by every account afterward, the most extraordinary cooking class in the history of the school.
He did not mention recipes. He did not mention seasoning. He talked about viscosity, and shear stress, and the rotational behavior of fluids, and as he talked, he demonstrated. He whisked a bowl of custard at precisely calculated speeds while explaining the Reynolds number, and the custard went smooth and glossy and perfect. He poured honey and cream side by side to show laminar flow. He flipped a crêpe to demonstrate angular momentum, and it spun up into the air and stuck to the ceiling, where it stayed for the rest of the semester. The students scribbled furiously in their notebooks. They had never heard anything like it. They assumed it was a revolutionary new French technique.
Then he came to his final demonstration.
“And now,” he announced, “the behavior of a fluid under extreme thermal stress.”
He picked up a bottle from the counter, which he believed to contain colored water, and which in fact contained a great deal of brandy. He poured it generously into a hot pan.
The resulting whoosh of flame went nearly to the ceiling. It set off the smoke alarm, which set off the sprinklers, which drenched every person in the room, every pot, every pan, and most especially the professor, whose hair, soaked and then blasted with hot air from the stove, rose up off his head in a gigantic gray cloud twice its normal size.
There was a stunned silence. Then, slowly, the thirty soaking-wet culinary students began to applaud. They clapped harder and harder, and someone cheered, and someone else whistled.
At that moment, the head of the culinary school burst through the door, took one horrified look at the scene, and then stopped, sniffing the air. He walked slowly over to the professor’s bowl of custard, dipped in a spoon, and tasted it.
His eyes filled with tears.
“This,” he whispered, “is the finest crème anglaise I have ever tasted in my life.”
“Is it?” said the professor, surprised. “I’m afraid I don’t eat custard. It’s far too interesting.”
And then, for the first time all morning, he looked at the clock on the wall. It said ten forty-seven.
“Goodness,” he said. “I’m going to be late.”
He arrived at the correct Hartwell Hall at ten fifty-one, dripping wet, his hair an enormous gray thundercloud, holding a bowl of custard he had forgotten to put down.
Dr. Pemberton met him in the corridor. She had been pacing there for fifty minutes, and she had chewed her way through two pencils. She opened her mouth to say a great many things. Then she saw him and simply closed it again.
The delegation from Geneva sat in the front row of the lecture theater, twelve distinguished physicists with their arms folded, looking deeply unimpressed. They watched the professor squelch across the stage, leaving a trail of puddles. They watched him set down the bowl of custard on the lectern. They watched him take a deep breath, beam at them with his huge startled eyes, and pick up a whisk.
Then he began to talk.
Forty minutes later, the delegation from Geneva rose to their feet as one and applauded until their hands hurt.
“Extraordinary,” said their chairman afterward, shaking the professor’s hand over and over. “And the custard. Using the custard to demonstrate non-Newtonian behavior. Brilliant. Simply brilliant. Whatever made you think of it?”
The professor looked at the bowl in surprise. He had forgotten it was there.
“I really couldn’t say,” he said honestly.
That evening, Professor Oddball sat in his armchair by the fire, in his slippers, with Newton on his lap and a cup of tea at his elbow, and read the evening paper.
The front page was all about a remarkable day in the city. A purse snatcher foiled on Linden Street by a mysterious stranger, who then vanished. A baby carriage rescued on the river bridge, the grateful father unable to name the hero. A legendary cooking demonstration at the university, which the culinary school was already calling the Great Custard Lecture. The real Chef Bertrand of Lyon, it was reported, had arrived two hours late, found the ceiling covered in crêpe, and been so offended that he went straight back to France.
There was a photograph, taken by a passerby on the bridge. It was very blurry. All you could really see was a tall, thin figure in a black suit, with an enormous cloud of wild gray hair.
Professor Oddball studied it with great interest for a long time, his huge eyes moving slowly over every word.
“What an extraordinary fellow,” he said finally, to Newton. “Purse snatchers. Babies. Custard. All in one morning.”He shook his head in admiration and turned the page. “Somebody really ought to give that man a medal.”
Newton looked up at him for a long moment with his round yellow eyes.
Then he sighed, the deep, weary sigh of a cat who has lived with a genius for eleven years, and went back to sleep.
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